Chapter 6: Lila at Midnight

At midnight someone knocked once on Pearl's door, softly.

Pearl was in her chair with the rolling pin across her knees.

She looked at me, and I got up and went to the peephole.

My own face looked back at me, thinner and paler, under a gray hooded coat.

I opened the door.

Lila stood on the landing alone, with her hair in a wet tangle and a hospital bracelet still on her wrist.

A purple bruise spread along the inside of her elbow where an IV had been yanked out.

"I took a cab," she said. "I don't have any money. The driver is downstairs, and I told him you'd pay."

I stared at her.

"I'm sorry," she said. "That's a stupid thing to say first."

I went down, paid the cab with the last of my tip money, and came back up.

She was sitting at the yellow table with her hands around a mug of Pearl's tea.

Pearl had put a cardigan over her shoulders and gone into the bedroom without a word.

The door was closed, but not latched.

I sat down across from my sister.

For a long time we only looked.

She had my eyes, my chin, and the little dent in the left eyebrow I'd got from a swing set when I was five.

She had never once been hungry in her life, and it showed in her shoulders.

"Show me," she said.

"Show you what?"

"The mark."

I turned my head and pushed my braid aside.

She leaned across the table, and her cold fingers touched the crescent behind my left ear.

Her breath caught. She pulled her hair back from her own ear and showed me the twin of it.

"Mother used to touch mine when I was sad," she said.

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